Thursday, December 8, 2016

So I finally got the Sigma MC-11 EF to E Mount Converter for the SONY alpha 7. I got it for refurbished, came with everything and in practically new condition for a reasonable $160. I’ve been following the development of EF to E mount converter for almost two years now.

Before the release of this sigma converter, the go to converter has always been the Metabones IV which costs $399. That’s way too expensive for a converter considering I only paid $1200 for the alpha 7 body+lens bundle. Few other options are some Hongkong, China based company products with low prices, but the reviews seem not too favorably.

While this Sigma converter was mainly designed to work with Sigma lens for EF Mount, it also works for the native Canon lenses as well. There are also firmware updates to support newer sigma lenses, some reviewers also claim improved compatibility with native Canon lenses.

Firmware update has to be done through the SIGMA Optimization Pro software. A proprietary USB cable is provided for connection. Latest update in October 2016, version seems to be 1.0.3.

I’ve tried all my Canon lenses, EF 24-105 F4L, EF 24-70 F2.8L II, EF 70-200 F2.8L II, EF 40 F2.8. All four lenses work with the converter. However, on the Alpha 7 body, the focusing speed is unbearably slow. All lenses struggled in hunting for the focus point, some better than the others. 24-105 and 40 seems worst, the two F2.8L lenses work a bit better.

I’m not sure how it works for the native Sigma lenses, another factor to consider is the alpha 7 isn’t a fast camera at focusing either, it also lacks IBIS BTW.

I would rather use manual focus, considering alpha 7 has a dedicated auto/manual focus button coupled with focus peaking, manual focusing is actually not that bad, as long as no fast moving objects.

Most of the metadata are preserved such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length.

Only thing altered by the converter is the lens model. The EF 70-200 F2.8L II is recognized as a SONY lens designation DT 70-200mm F2.8 SAM in lightroom.

Overall, I think it’s a keeper for me, especially considering I got a pretty good deal on it. Maybe someday I’ll get one or two Sigma ART lens to pair with it and see the focusing performance upgrade…

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

So I have XPS 13 9350 for almost 11 months now, except early on I tried a USB Type-C to USB A hub which ends up being total failure, I haven’t bothered with this port. Lately my interest for USB Type-C has been resurged after Apple announced their Macbook Pro with four USB Type-C ports. Since I already got a regular USB A hub, my focus this time is on the HDMI 2.0 4K 60Hz output since there is no video output built-in for 9350. I did some researches online about this subject, the information seems extremely scarce. The built-in Intel 520 definitely supports quite high resolution output since those QHD+ touchscreen models can drive at 3200x1800 @60Hz. And an article HERE indicates via Displayport it can output max 3840x2160 @60Hz.

My goal here is to output to my Dell U3415W Ultrawide screen at 3440x1440 @60Hz via the HDMI 2.0 input (The DisplayPort is already occupied with a i5 3xxx desktop paired with Nvidia GTX-960 Graphic card driving at 3440x1440 @60Hz). The only USB Type-C devices I can find that got someone confirmed working are the google USB Type-C to DisplayPort Cable, the Plugable USB Type-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter. Other options are docks such as the Plugable and Dell’s WD15, but they are way too expensive, not to mention not very portable.

Price wise it’s the same as the google adapter at $40, 40% more expensive than the plugable adapter at $25. So I gave the Dell adapter a try since the support list specifically lists 9350 and HDMI 2.0 mentioned, and it worked! I’m able to successfully drive the U3415W at 3440x1440 @60Hz.

Since it’s an adapter only, you need to supply your own HDMI 2.0 cable. I got the Monoprice 6ft one.

The monitor is being correctly recognized as the model no U3415W. Resolution and refresh rate all run at the optimal parameter!

Audio wise, unfortunately it only can output to the built-in stereo speaker.

Therefore, only stereo output is possible.

Since it was a success for video, naturally I would like to go one step further for the audio output. There are other two ways for output audio via the 3.5mm earphone jack or via the Bluetooth. But neither will give you the optimal performance with surround sound. I’m looking at output at least the compressed surround sound DD5.1 and DTS 5.1.

The Vizio SB4051-C0 5.1CH soundbar offers HDMI input and output, allows extracting DD 5.1 and DTS 5.1 from the HDMI then route the video to the monitor. So my exact setup is as follows:

Dell XPS 13 9350 USB Type-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter –> HDMI input on soundbar, HDMI output->Dell U3415W monitor. This setup unfortunately did not work out. I have some doubt about whether the soundbar supports HDMI 2.0 would play into a factor, and I was right.

The Dell U3415W is being recognized as a DTV CP9687. Any resolution beyond 1080p gets 30Hz and below.

And this CP9687 chip seems only support Dolby Digital…

Lastly, the other test I haven’t tried yet is to hook up the HDMI to pass through a receiver to see if bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD is possible. To be continued…

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

So I just got the recently released SONY NW-A35HN LM from Amazon.co.jp. It appears that amazon japan started shipping even electronics to US now (the product has to be sold by amazon, not by third party). And the shipping is very reasonable for under $7, delivered in three days after shipment, all the way from Japan! Plus you don’t get charged VAT. Only thing not so great is the exchange rate. I also got the silicon case with screen protector.

I had the NW-M505 Walkman for more than two years now. The player is much smaller than I had imagined by just seeing the pictures online. Maybe I was deceived by those NW-WM1A bricks… Should have checked the dimensions first.

Size comparison with a FiiO DAP which I rarely used mostly due to its lack of auto off feature. The A35 is missing a timer function as well… Oh, it includes a hole for attaching straps, very much appreciated.

This is the first High-Res player for me. I waited out A10 and A20 series since the NW-M505 served my general listening very well.

Now I want to move on to mostly playing FLAC tracks, especially those high bitrate FLACs from MORA and the like.

The player supports DSD also, but it’s converted to LPCM internally, pure DSD signal can be output to SONY’s DAP such as PHA-3. The player comes with 4 demo tracks.

I chose the Viridian Blue color. Unfortunately the cable is a proprietary WM-port. Thus now I have to carry three kinds of USB cable, MicroUSB, USB-C, and this cable… The build quality is okay, it’s definitely not giving you a premium feel. I do like the square-ish design as I don’t like rounded corners that much. The device is a lot thicker than modern day cellphones.

The matching color schemed silicon case seems a lot brighter than the player itself. The screen protector is easy to apply thanks to the small size screen. The color temperature of the screen is on the cool side, resulting in too much blue tint to my eyes. Unfortunately there’s no option to adjust the color temperature in the UI. The 3.1in 800x480 resolution is definitely on the lower end nowadays. But the point of this player is a music player. SONY seems to have learned their lesson that full blown android music player does not work so well, therefore they scaled back to basic music playback function this year. Since this is the first generation of touchscreen A series player, the UI is somewhat sluggish, but it’s not too bad. Also the physical buttons are still provided. The silicon case makes pushing the keys hard, I’m still debating if I should have the case on or not. There is also a cover type protector, it has magnet so that when flipped open, the screen lights up automatically. The hardware buttons do not light up the screen thankfully.

The main appeal for me is that the player supports microSD cards. I’m pretty sure it supports higher than the advertised 128GB limit since the previous gen A20 series already supports 200GB as reported by someone here. Therefore I only got the cheapest 16GB model. The system seems to treat both internal and external storage as one big drive. As when play all is chosen, all songs are accessed.

The microSD cards should be formatted as exFAT if they are over 32GB. SONY has claimed they conducted tests based on a 20000 songs combined on internal and external storages that the player will be operated smoothly.

As being a Japanese model, there is only Japanese interface. While the Chinese model provides a number of language options:

But I’m a firm believer that there are quality differences between products released in different regions, even if they are manufactured in the same place by the same factory. Therefore I imported this player from Japan instead of China. Considering the devaluation of Chinese yuan, importing from China seems quite appealing, but I would rather pay some premium for a Japanese model. I’ve seen some complaints on the build quality from one Chinese forum saying that the back has slight bulging issue. I did not notice such on my machine. Although on the initial release of the Japanese model, some machine suffers from mixed display of English for the menu so that SONY has to stop the sales temporally.

Unlike M505, the boot time on this player is very long, depends on how many songs you have, it updates the database every time, it could take 30sec to 1 min to complete the boot sequence. My solution here is just to leave the machine on all the time, the standby doesn’t seem to drain battery much at all. When you unplug the audio cable, music stops automatically.

I used two headphones to test the audio quality. Tested with MDR-7506 first, a wired monitor. It sounds very flat, which is the overall signature of the player. The M505 has a warmer sound than this player.

The digital processing on this player is called S-MASTER HX, an upgraded version of the M505’s S-MASTER MX. I have to turn on ClearAudio+ to get more flavor out of the music tracks. Here are a list of sound effects the player supports:

Turning ClearAudio+ will override all these processing. The major difference is that SONY removed CLEAR BASS. So if you like more bass, you might want to have a headphone with extra bass in it. The Equalizer has 6 bands now instead of 5, with added 60hz, probably to compensate the lack of CLEAR BASS? I have yet to play around with Equalizer option, it supports two custom settings aside from a handful presets for different genres. DSEE HX is the solution for poor audio quality sound tracks, it tries to improve the low bitrate mp3 tracks to better sounds. DC phase linearizer linearizes phase shift for low frequency, simulates analog amplifier sound, haven’t tried this option yet. VPT is a simulated surround sound option, haven’t tried this yet, probably never will. Dynamic Normalizer tries to normalize audio volume among different sound track so that they sound in about the same level.

Now switching to the wireless headphone, a SONY MDR-ZX770BN. This player comes with support for Bluetooth ver 4.2. Unfortunately there is a mismatching on the devices here: The 770BN headphone was 2015 product which support SBC and APT-X codecs only, while the 2016 A35 music player support SBC and SONY’s proprietary LDAC codecs. So the best sound I could get is only the SBC codec. I don’t think this sounds as good as the connection from my XPS 13 laptop. Sound is quite muffled here.

The player supports NFC for easy pairing of the Bluetooth devices, therefore the back of the device is plastic to allow signal to transmit, while the front is made of aluminum. As far as Bluetooth usage, the player can pair speaks and headphones for audio output, but it won’t accept any Bluetooth signal such as from the cellphone or laptop unlike M505. The player supports Bluetooth remote control, I tried to pair with an Android Bluetooth remote, but it couldn’t recognize it. So I guess the only remote it supports is the official SONY one which cost quite a bit.

The output power has been upped quite significantly on this gen, 35mW＋35mW（16Ω）compared to mere 10mWx2 from previous gen. The volume is divided into a whopping 100 levels, compared to a mere 16 levels on M505. The menu supports gestures during playback. You can swipe four directions to get to different settings easily. There is on-the-fly bookmark and playlist features. I just wish the UI has a dropdown notification like Android where you can toggle Bluetooth and NFC on/off quickly…

I’ve also been playing around with Medio Go software a bit since finding out simple drag and drop seems to have missing album artwork and some songs have missing characters. One major problem is that Media Go does NOT treat internal storage and mounted storage equally. It supports auto audio track recognition and artwork from Gracenote, but only on the songs that’s stored on internal storage. The solution is to mount the external storage as a mount point on the C drive. And then point the directive to the one on C drive inside Media Go. This has been worked flawlessly to find most of the albums missing info. If you insist to skip Media Go and use drag and drop, do note that the album artwork SONY players supported are baseline jpg only. If you happen to download progressive jpg or png files, they will NOT show as artwork.

Other features on this player includes FM tuner, voice recorder, lyrics display, language learning which I have yet to play around with.

A final conclusion on this initial impression report is that I’m pretty impressed with this little player. I just need more time to get used to the interface and play around a bit more to have a proper opinion on this machine. So far it shows pretty promising.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

So I bought the XPS 13 9350 ultrabook in December 2015. Basic configuration is 1080p non-touch screen, I5 6200 CPU, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM. I’ve been mostly happy with the laptop so far. But there is one problem with laptop, the wifi card it’s included has very poor signal under certain environment, especially with the Synology RT1900ac router under 5G connection.

So I replaced it with Intel 8260 wifi card recently, and the connection has been stable so far.

Opening up the laptop wasn’t as hard as I thought after following the ifixit guide and youtube video.

Left is the crappy Dell DW 1820A wifi card that came with the machine. Right is the replaced Intel 8260 wifi card, the third gen wifi card that’s capable of connection speed upto 867Mbps under 5G. (2nd gen 7265 works with it as well, and it’s about $10 cheaper)

The next part I would like to replace is the m2. SSD. I’ll wait for the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB to come down to around $200 price point. But the current 256GB+128GB microSD card has been serving me pretty well. (I got the microSD adapter that can insert flush with the machine) I don’t really need any more space so far.

After replacing the wifi card, I got some trouble with the Bluetooth driver. So I just completely reinstalled windows. It’s the first time I reinstall on a m2 NVME drive. I did plenty research on it and ran into some issues, but was able to solve the problems. So here are the procedures I did (I used the RAID approach by loading Intel RAID drivers manually during windows 10 installation):

1. Prepare USB stick. I’m using Rufus. Change the partition to GPT for UEFI, and File system to FAT32. I have a 64GB USB drive, didn’t bother to try NTFS.

After Rufus is done, it should have bootx64.efi under efi>boot folder. This is the boot file that you need to boot from USB. I ran into a problem where Dell’s UEFI wouldn’t boot from the USB drive. But it worked after I manually pointed this file in bios. The step will be shown later.

Now download the intel RAID driver, and put it on the USB drive. You’ll have to manually point to the driver during windows installation, otherwise windows cannot see your drive.

2. UEFI Settings:

My approach is to keep the RAID setting intact. Insert USB drive before booting into UEFI.

(1). Disable Secure Boot

(2). Check “Enable Legacy Option ROMs” in Advanced Boot Options.

(3). Manually add the bootx64.efi in the “Boot Sequence” menu. I have a hard time with the USB will not boot. I finally resolved the problem by doing this.

Windows 10 installation is easy afterwards, you just need to point it to the intel RAID driver. I deleted the 10GB Dell recovery partition as I don’t feel I ever need it. The only problem I have so far is that some drivers and setting software downloaded from Dell will not install now as the system is not Dell specific. But the manufacture drivers from Intel, Microsoft etc works just fine.

A quick review about the laptop is that it improves upon Dell’s software updates, especially the BIOS updates. The first months I got the laptop has a lot of issues including random reboots, BSOD, etc. But they seem to disappear since January. The biggest appeal for this laptop is of course the thin bezel. I’m surprised that to this day, there is still no competitors coming up with bezels this thin (well, there is LG gram 13 and 15, and Samsung Notebook 9 NP900X5L-K02US). The speed of the laptop is reasonably fast, it runs with SONY Vegas video editing software and Adobe Lightroom just fine. The battery lasts me a good 5-6 hours (I’ve never been able to reach the claimed 10 hours). Another appealing factor is that Dell has some good accessories going along with it. The one I like so much is the power companion. A portable charger that can provide 35w power to the laptop and two additional USB ports for smartphones and tablets. The one I got is the smaller and lighter four cell PW7015M 12000mah. It can charge XPS 13 9350 upto 50% full through a single charge very quickly. And the recharge time is phenomenal in under 2 to 3 hours.